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The Empathy Gap and Why Women Are Treated So Badly In Open Source Projects (perens.com)
Bruce Perens writes: There's no shortage of stories of horrible treatment of women in Open Source projects. But how did we get here? How did we ever get a community where a vocal minority of males behave in the most boorish, misogynistic, objectifying manner toward women? I have a theory: "It’s unfortunately the case that software development in general and Open Source communities are frequented by males who have social development issues. I once complained online about how offended I was by a news story that said many software developers were on the autism spectrum. To my embarrassment, there were many replies to my complaint by people who wrote 'no, I really am on the spectrum and I’m not alone here.'
It’s still an open issue whether males and females have built-in biases that, for example, lead fewer women to be programmers, or if such biases only develop as a response to social signals. There is more science to be done. But it’s difficult to do that sort of science because we can’t separate the individuals from the social signals they’ve grown up with. Certainly we can improve the situation for the women who would be programmers except for the social signals."
It’s still an open issue whether males and females have built-in biases that, for example, lead fewer women to be programmers, or if such biases only develop as a response to social signals. There is more science to be done. But it’s difficult to do that sort of science because we can’t separate the individuals from the social signals they’ve grown up with. Certainly we can improve the situation for the women who would be programmers except for the social signals."
There are some people who really are awful to women, and they're often (but not always) really awful to work with in other ways too. Finding ways to get them to either improve or get out is tricky because they exist in the same career ladders as people who want a decent place to work.
Then there's a subset of people opposing them who insist on overly narrow notions of how people should be allowed to act, talk, and think. They take it on themselves to police speech and behaviour far more than is reasonable or necessary. In their effort to deal with a legitimate problem, they become another kind of problem.
Making all this less clear is that the boundaries between these are unclear and they tend (but don't always) to line up with political views, and political witchhunts in the workplace (or broader society) are dangerous and ill-advised.
It's messy enough that it'd be tempting to just step back from the whole thing, but the stakes are too high for that. We neither should want to waste the potential of half our population (or other subsets of the population) nor should we create a work environment or society where most kinds of differing views on gender or jokes are curtailed. So navigating this is damned tough.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Why does this have to be a "male" problem versus an "asshole" problem?
If you say there are unpleasant women to work with, doesn't that kind of transcend gender?
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Being an expert in a particular area means that you have neglected learning in other areas. You only have so much time to learn things. To many technically oriented people all of the vagueness of social interactions is not logical, it cannot be derived from first principles. If is culture and it is that way because that is the way it is. This isn't interesting to many technical people so we spend our time on more interesting things. So while you may bitch that technical people don't have social skills what you really mean is that instead of learning social skills they spent that time becoming an expert in a technical field. You have spent your time learning social skills and then complain the reason you don't have technical skills is because those with them are mean. That's like me after spending my life learning English moving to a Spanish speaking country and bitching that I could learn Spanish much easier if all of these people would just learn English to help me. Sorry but that's not how it works.
I am an excellent mechanical design engineer that has spend over 20 years learning and honing my skills. This includes studying in my spare time and even my hobbies contribute in some way. Even entertainment I like watching "How it's made" so I can see examples of automation equipment for ideas. Some bosses have asked me to put together a 30 minute talk to help people learn to become a good design engineer. I laugh (maybe my lack of social skills) and say I only need a minute. I'd tell the people to dedicate their lives and spend 20 years learning this stuff and you can be just like me! Most people don't want to do that and spend their time with other things. That's fine, but don't come complaining that I lack budgeting or scheduling skills. No kidding, I have no interest in management. That's your job.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Safe spaces are a symptom yes, but you're wrong about the disease.
The disease: Raising kids to believe that women are always right and men are always wrong, giving every kid a trophy just for showing up, and helicopter parents holding kids' hands their entire lives. We know have a generation of legal adults that require "trigger warnings" before they hear anything the least bit upsetting during university lectures.
So why are you carrying water for a group that prefer to whinge, complain, and force others to act the way they want, instead of getting off their ass and downloading source to start their own projects?
Cover your ears (trigger warning): You're too old to buy into this bullshit, and I believe this is a troll to get back in the headlines.
As a woman who's been in the electronics/computer field for more than 55 years, now, I read with much disgust the attempts by some in this thread to discount women, and then claim that, somehow, "It ain't true."
Believe me, I've been there. After three books, hundreds of published papers and articles, and decades of consulting to Fortune 500 firms, I have been on the receiving end of the misogynistic "swinging dicks" who couldn't write a competent subroutine or draw a working circuit if their lives depended on it. I can (and, in the past, have) named names and identified organizations where women dare not go. What's interesting is having the CEO of a Fortune 500 company hire me (at $2,500/day) and then have twerps three years out of school decide they know more than I and refuse my counsel because my anatomy is different from theirs. Usually, there's a competent male around who steps in and shuts the abuse down. When there's not, I have developed a strong skill in suckering such blithering idiots into cul de sacs of their own ignorant reasoning, until they are reduced to mumbling to themselves. But, why should I ever have had to DEVELOP that skill?
We are all born the same way, and discover our gender as we grow up...but, due to family influences (e.g., drunken men abusing their wives, "men of the house" who want their women "barefoot and pregnant"), some males grow up with a tacit belief that women are, somehow, inferior to men. There's a name for these people: They are BIGOTS (and it often extends to other differences, like cultural heritage, skin color, education, that are patently irrelevant to judging whether the person is "human" or not).
Fortunately, not all men are chained to this philosphers' wall, drawing conclusions from shadows and accepting them as fact. There are many men who exhibit humanity and treat ALL others with respect and dignity...and they are a delight to work alongside. Unfortunately, they are outnumbered by the dolts, in my experience.
Ian was a really bright and capable guy with a dark side. Unfortunately, at times he had difficulty dealing with anger, debilitating depression, and blame projection. He was arrested for battery and illegal confinement in 2009, this event with SFPD wasn't the first time.
I was his friend once, although that was more than a decade ago. I absolutely hate that he died without a friend left in the world to help him and in such an undignified, unfair, senseless way. But that's what happened. The police were not to blame.
Bruce Perens.
It didn't take too long after he passed on a (perhaps paranoid, but perhaps not) warning about some people trying to entrap high-profile Open Source people into sexual harassment complaints at conferences before a few women posted some vague accusations of Raymond "creeping" on them at conferences. Including some he wasn't at.
I have an idea for starters. How about, to start, that all sexual abuse and harassment will be considered strictly unacceptable?
Define that. In my first sexual harassment class back in the late 80's, a fellow asked the counselor what sexual harassment was defined as.
Her answer? "Anything any woman thinks is sexual harassment - is sexual harassment.
As you might imagine, a hush fell over the room. How does one have any interaction with a woman if she can interpret "hello" as sexual harassment?
I did ask a coworker what she considered as harassment - she said "It depends". Keep in mind this was a woman who used to find it funny to goose me when I was using a glove box and couldn't move or get hy hands loose.
But back to our counselor we were told that remarks on how the woman looked, saying we liked her jewelry, or her dress, or her hairstyle, or any mention of anything physical or anything that could be interpreted as sexual in nature would very likely result in us getting fired.
Know what effect that had on most every man there? We avoided women like the plague. We made certain that nothing other than business was discussed when we absolutely had to deal with them, and we very often made certain to have a witness along with us.
Know what effect that had on the assholes? None.
Want to know what effect that had on 99 percent of the women there? Pissed them off royally. Our staff assistant had the dirtiest mind I've ever known. Silly small talk. She was devastated when the guys started avoiding her. Because despite what a few folks think, women actually think about sex, talk about sex, and make jokes about it.
Some years later, after seeing the unproductive chill this had put on campus inter-gender relations, not to mention actual real cases remained unchanged in number, these draconian guidelines were relaxed a good bit.
I'm not certain if the incident had anything to do with the change of heart, but not too long before this happened, one of the machinists was taken to task because someone saw in his toolbox, a photograph of a cheerleader. Since photographs of women in cute little outfits were considered harassment of other women, he was turned into HR.
The offensive photograph that was so demeaning to women and considered sexual harassment? It was a photo of his daughter, who had made the high school cheerleading team. He did note that if he was disciplined, he was going to take it to the legal system, as denying hime to post a school photo of his daughter, not unlike the ones the HR people had on their desks, surely looked like discrimination.
So be careful what you ask for. In your ideal world where women cannot hear anything regarding sex, you could end up with...http://feminist.org/education/SexSegregation.asp
or http://www.tolerance.org/magaz...
https://62e528761d0685343e1c-f...
http://cdn.inquisitr.com/wp-co...
or even.....http://www.relativityonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/12653311_img9939.jpg
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.